


Value

by Decipher (Straggler)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But not too much this time!, Gen, Hank Anderson Swears, How Do I Tag, Post-Game, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29330946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Straggler/pseuds/Decipher
Summary: Hank should've known. He should've known inviting Connor to stick around his place for a bit while the android gets his feet back under him was to also invite trouble. He'd only known the kid for a week before making that offer but it had been enough time for him to figure out that Connor just isn't the type of person to leave things well enough alone, not when he thinks he can do something about it. After all, the kid broke into his damn house to make sure he didn't die after getting a bit too deep in the bottle.(This short one-shot came to me one day as I was cleaning out some things from my room. Nostalgia hit me and I thought: I bet Hank's got stuff in his house that makes him feel the same way. Behold.)
Relationships: Hank Anderson & Connor
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	Value

**Author's Note:**

> There's MINIMAL SWEARING in this story. Like, less than a handful, which is probably a record. Haha~
> 
> Come on, Hank, time to board the train down memory lane! Choo choo!

  
Hank should've known. He should've known inviting Connor to stick around his place for a bit while the android gets his feet back under him was to also invite trouble. He'd only known the kid for a week before making that offer but it had been enough time for him to figure out that Connor just isn't the type of person to leave things well enough alone, not when he thinks he can do something about it. After all, the kid broke into his damn house to make sure he didn't die after getting a bit too deep in the bottle.

It's been well over five months since then and it doesn't look like Connor's interested in moving on just yet, which is fine by him. Sumo likes the company, anyway.

He knows Connor means well though, but it doesn't make him less irritated at how much of a busybody he's being, always trying to find something to do around the house, going from reorganizing the cupboards and pantry in the kitchen to reordering the drawers in his bathroom to rearranging the books on his shelves in the living room to readjusting the way he keeps his clothes in his goddamn bedroom.

He really should've known that Connor will eventually move on to trying to sort out his mess of a garage as well just so his car would have somewhere to go instead of being left outside to either bake in the sun or freeze in the snow.

'You said your car is your pride and joy, and yet you leave her exposed to the elements, Hank.'

'Call me a hypocrite,' he grumbles, holding back the urge to roll his eyes as he eats the stupid chicken salad that Connor made for his lunch. He won't admit that it's nice, even if it's got more leafy greens than he'd typically like in his food; they're so annoying to eat.

There's already a small pile of boxes by the door that Hank decides he honestly doesn't want to keep. It's been collecting dust in the garage for nearly half a decade; the fact that he hasn't missed them at all says enough about how little thought he's paid them.

Although, now that he thinks about it, he really should've known that Connor will eventually stumble across a piece of memory he'd rather have left behind him as well.

The first hint he gets that Connor's found something regarding his past is the way he falls eerily silent, no longer commenting on all the bits and pieces he's finding stashed away in his garage. Hank pauses from where he's trying to sneak a carrot stick to Sumo; if he has to be healthy than damn it, so does his dog, although Sumo seems to be enjoying it a hell of a lot more than he is.

'Connor?' He calls out and spears a piece of chicken and a couple of baby spinach leaves onto his fork and sandwiches it with another piece of chicken to balance it off. 'You've gone awful quiet! You found something or what?'

'Yes,' he says after a short moment, the sound of him shuffling things about in the garage resuming, followed by the soft footfalls of him re-entering the home.

'What d'ya find?' He asks as he pushes Sumo's face away from him before the saint bernard can get a bite of his food. 

He sees Connor come around the corner into the kitchen holding a taped-up white shoe box, decently large, and it doesn't seem familiar at first until he catches sight of the childish handwriting scribbled all over it in black marker. In hindsight, he should've thrown it out the moment he got it in the mail.

'I didn't look through it,' Connor quickly reassures him as he holds out the box for him to take, Hank's full name written messily all over it. 'I know you have given me free reign with sorting through the contents of your garage but I thought you might want to decide what to do with this box.'

He guesses that's fair, although he holds no particular feelings of sentimentality to whatever's inside it. 'Thanks, I guess,' he says as he gets up, makes sure to push the salad closer to the middle of the table where Sumo can't get to it before he takes the box from Connor. 

The kid is slow to let it go, as if he's worried about accidentally dropping it. He appreciates the gesture but he doesn't really care about it either way; it's just another relic to be thrown out with the rest of the trash.

He puts it aside, on top of the pile of things by the front door ready to be taken to the dump once he can muster up the energy to change out of his ratty pajamas into some clothes to leave the house in. He catches the quick blink of a yellow LED from Connor's temple followed by a confused furrow of his eyebrows, his brown eyes oddly focused on the box.

'What,' Hank grumbles. He's already wasted a chunk of his day off humoring Connor about the state of his garage; he's not interested in dealing with whatever else he's got going on in that head of his.

'I--' he starts and stops, unusual but surprisingly human-like. 'You're throwing it away?'

He shrugs and sits back down, dragging what's left of his lunch towards him again. 'Yeah, it's just junk.'

'But...' he trails off, still looking at the shoe box for a couple more beats before turning back to Hank. 'Isn't it Cole's?'

He blinks, and he guesses that makes sense; it's a kid's handwriting scribbled all across the white cardboard after all. He shakes his head and goes back to poking at his food, 'Nah, it's mine. Just a fucking time capsule thing I put in when I was a kid. Got sent to me when I hit 50,' he finishes with a snort.

'Oh, I see.' The LED swirls back into blue and Hank snorts again, feeling endeared.

'It's mostly junk, if I remember correctly,' he says to reassure Connor and sees him immediately relax, no longer looking worried or concerned or like he's walking on thin ice. 

Connor turns back to he shoe box sitting on top of the pile and then looks to Hank once more, gesturing to it with a thumb, 'May I?'

He raises his eyebrows but isn't surprised that the kid is interested to know what's inside of it considering he's an investigative prototype android. He shrugs, 'Sure, knock yourself out,' he says as he finishes off the last few bits of green in the salad, leaving a few pieces of chicken to the side, saving the best for last.

He watches the kid bring it over to the table and as soon as he sets it down, Sumo immediately leaves his side to pester Connor's as if he might be hiding dog treats inside the box. 

There's a thick layer of tape wrapped around it that Connor slices through at the seams with a box cutter before the lid gets lifted away. He listens to the kid look through the box a bit before deciding he's not gonna watch anymore, taking his empty bowl to the sink to deal with later.

Hank leaves him alone with his old time capsule stuff as he goes back into the garage to sort out his shit. It's kind of nice to throw out the junk he no longer wants, clearing up the space and emptying it out into something halfway usable. He thinks he can actually convert it into a man-cave is he wants, or maybe a bedroom if Connor is interested. Sure, the kid doesn't sleep and he's only got a few sets of clothes he keeps on a single shelf in Hank's room but he deserves his own space, too. Connor's taken to wearing mostly business-casual clothes, even at home, but at least it's better than his old CyberLife uniform that's hung up and shoved to the very back of the closet, out of sight, out of mind.

Eventually, he hears a little laugh from Connor and he thinks about ignoring it for a little while until his own curiosity gets the better of him.

'What's so funny?' He asks as he makes his way down the corridor back towards the kitchen. The kid's taken up a seat at the dining table and has the letter Hank wrote to himself from when he was 7 years old. He sighs, 'What did my idiot self write.'

Connor smiles at him and then begins to read it, 'Dear myself, I like dogs. Do you have a dog yet? I hope you got a big, big dog.'

He groans and steals the letter right out of his hands and reads the rest for himself, although he's sure Connor's already scanned the whole damn thing into his memory or something. 

The handwriting is big in some places, small in others. The spacing is wildly inconsistent and the spelling is obviously something his kid self was still trying to grasp. Some sentences either slope upwards or downhill and it's shaky and wonky as hell but heck, what can you honestly expect from a 7 year old kid, anyway? He chortles as he reads it.

_Did yu aso becom a floris? Dad says is a womins job but I like flawers an so does mum an I want mum to be happy. Are yu a floris? I hope yu are becaus I dont care about dad._

'Holy shit,' he laughs at himself, feeling bittersweet.

He thinks he wanted to be a florist up until he hit 9 years old then changed his mind and wanted to be a doctor when his mum got sick from breast cancer and died a few short years later, then changed his mind again when he turned 17. He remembers getting a call from the hospital and finding out his dad got mugged, almost dying from it. He never liked his dad but it didn't mean he didn't care for him in some way. Family is family after all, even if they're sometimes shit about it.

_I hope yu are happeir._   
_Frum myself._

Hank sighs then carefully refolds it, following the crease lines and placing it next to the opened box on the table that Connor is carefully looking through, picking up items one at a time that his 7 year old self had put in and turning it over in his hands, maybe scanning them for information.

There's a white tamagotchi in it, a rainbow plastic slinky, an etch-a-sketch, and a small pouch of marbles, all of the treasures of his childhood that he remembers fondly but doesn't hold any particularly strong feelings of sentimentality for. Still, it's nice to see them anyway.

Connor tips the bag of marbles into his open palm, a couple of galaxy marbles, cat's eyes, and milky ways in there, touching them with the tip of his thumb. Hank huffs a little at the sight of him, his lips quirking up in a smile.

'You really don't want to keep these?' Connor asks as he spills the marbles back into the pouch, tying them off before putting it back into the box.

'Nah. I thought you wanted me to throw out my junk, not keep them,' he points out with a smirk, amused by the first show of reluctance over something as small as this.

The kid turns towards him, his LED spinning blue and his eyes bright and curious. 'Well, yes, but these are items from your childhood. Are they not worth keeping?'

He shrugs, 'I don't really care either way. I mean, it was nice to see them again but eh.'

'I see,' he says as he turns his attention back to the contents of the box, obviously contemplative.

An idea strikes him and he nudges Connor on the shoulder. 'You want 'em?'

He snaps his eyes to him, wide and surprised. 'You'll give them to me?'

Hank chortles again, 'Sure, go wild.'

Connor smiles, 'Thank you.'

He expects the kid to start going through them again but Connor just puts the lid back onto the box and puts it aside on the table carefully, far enough away from the edge that Sumo can't get curious himself and accidentally tip it off the table. He watches Connor treat it with an unusual amount of care, as if they're precious, and Hank guesses that maybe they are to him, since it's probably one of the few gifts he's ever been given and it makes him feel kind of bad that he's giving the kid old hand me downs that he was pretty much going to just throw out.

They get back to work cleaning up the garage for another handful of hours until it's pretty much all cleared out. Hank feels pretty pleased with how much they managed to get done during their day off and he happily sits down to some takeout dinner and a bottle of beer as a reward, glad that Connor is distracted enough with his new box of toys that he doesn't tell Hank off about the amount of calories that's probably in his kung pao chicken and egg rolls.

Connor's back to sitting across the table and he watches the kid play with the etch-a-sketch. Hank wonders what a super computer like Connor would find so interesting about a rudimentary drawing toy like that but hey, one man's trash is another man's treasure and all that jazz. 

He's just about done with his dinner when Connor sits back on his seat, a pleased look on his face, holding up the etch-a-sketch like he just made a work of art.

He gives in to his curiosity again. 'What have ya got there?'

'Sumo,' he answers as he turns the toy around and shows off a perfect rendition of the saint bernard laying in his dog bed with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. Hank snorts; he should've guessed that Connor would draw Sumo first.

That night, he makes a quick trip to the supermarket to buy some batteries and, when he gets home, tosses it over towards Connor sitting on the couch with Sumo laying right across his lap. The kid catches it right out of the air, scanning it briefly before lighting up and shifting Sumo aside so he can take the tamagotchi out of the shoe box and slip the batteries in.

It switches on with a little old-school ditty and it makes Hank laugh at how absurdly happy the kid looks with such an old toy.

The following days after, he notices Connor taking the tamagotchi everywhere with him, always checking on it throughout the day whenever he's got some spare time at work which, as an android, he has plenty of considering he's capable of multitasking efficiently.

It makes Hank chortle, feeling the urge to tease, but he's happy, too. Happy that Connor is finding enjoyment in these little things his 7 year old self used to love. He thinks it's nice that Connor gets to have a childhood in some small way.

He thinks back to the letter that he wrote to himself and thinks: _Yeah. I'm happier now._

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you find stuff that makes you smile and sometimes you find things that make you cringe and immediately throw out.
> 
> I was pretty half-and-half on that front. But on the bright side, I've made room for other things that I wanna keep around in my life. It's hard at first, but well worth the effort~


End file.
